Photo And Social Media Websites: Are You Ready? (Part I)
The world wide web has produced an astounding array of photo-related sites. Almost all of them are free to sign-up with, with subscription fees for premium features or a larger photo storage space. Their purposes vary from experienced to beginners, from social networking to photo sharing, from selling your photos to bookmarking what you want. In addition to this, many of these sites combine such features to invent their own formula.
You can be a exultant fanatic and exhaust days trying to learn all your alternatives, or quickly get going on one of the more widely held sites, where you’re virtually sure to have a first-rate experience with a plethora of features to keep you busy.
The question is what are the prerequisites besides getting pictures onto you hard disk drive? Hold on! A few websites even let you upload images right from your cell phone! Now, let me rephrase that. What does it take to get your images ready for photo sharing websites?
Once you choose the picture sharing website that suits your requirements, you’ll want to identify what restrictions there are on bandwidth. Is there a monthly limitation as to how many images you can upload? Is there a cost to upgrade to a higher storage limit? Of course that is of consequence only if you’ll need to share a large number of photos.
If you are worried about the maximum values, there are a number of things you can perform to remain under that radar and elude upgrading. Your best decision is to upload only the photos that are really worth sharing, either for the reason of their special meaning, or because of their artistic value. Of course that depends on why you’re there. If you’re selective, you’ll be uploading a smaller number of images, and making the most of what you do share.
A lot of photo sharing websites do not have image size limitations because these sites are intended to share high quality photos. However, if you don’t require the highest resolution, resizing the picture is an excellent idea. If your camera was set to high resolution, but you only want to share an ordinary photo, you can use a software such as Bulk Photo Resizer to do the chore very effortlessly.
As a matter of fact, if you have a lot of images with similar requirements, you can have Bulk Photo Resizer do the same function on all of them at the same time. This is a splendid time saver. For a typical family picture that doesn’t need high resolution, you can satisfy your visitors with a size from 400 to 600 pixels per inch on the longest edge. It just so happens that Bulk Photo Resizer has presets for these dimensions, and others, so you don’t even need to manually input your preferred dimensions. It will even keep everything in proportion for you.
Whatever happens, don’t enlarge your photo. Bulk Photo Resizer will prohibit you from doing this. Enlarging will not improve your resolution, it will just make the imperfections larger and more jagged. The larger it is, the futher you’ll notice jagged edges. These jagged edges or “jaggies” are from the actual square pixels that make up the image.
As soon as those squares get too big they become pretty observable throughout the picture, not just on the edging. The photo start looking like the effect you see used on television to veil someone’s face.
(to be continued…)
